Ty Helbach
Ferguson honed his repertoire at a weekly residence at HotelRed.
Houston born, Manitowoc-raised Pat Ferguson has never heard his orphic folk music compared to Graham Nash. That’s surprising because Ferguson and Nash definitely drink from the same cup of celestial tea. With one difference: Nash is a delicate, deliberate acoustic guitar strummer, while Ferguson picks his instrument hard, like a rocking Leo Kottke.
That all comes front and center in the first two tracks of Ferguson’s debut solo album, Light of Day/Dark of Night. The first cut, a benediction, is a gentle instrumental that serves as grace before the meal. “Howl,” the ponderous second track with a recurring, melancholy fiddle line, is steeped in Laurel Canyon mysticism that could have been written on Joni Mitchell’s floor.
In a town brimming with gifted folk rock artists, Ferguson’s new songs show him to be the current leader of the pack. It doesn’t hurt that some of the region’s best folk musicians contribute to the effort, an embarrassment of riches that includes Jacob Jolliff (Yonder Mountain) on mandolin, Sara Vos (Dead Horses) on vocals and Kyle Keegan (Mandolin Orange) on a drum track. But, of course, quality attracts quality.
The quality extends to the producer, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades’ Adam Greuel, who primarily recorded the album at Madison’s Blast House studios.
“The name of the game was to harness the characteristics that Pat and the other musicians brought to the table,” says Greuel. “What really attracted me to the project was Pat’s unique finger-style playing in juxtaposition with his songwriting.”
With the exception of “Me to You,” which flirts with the string section a tad too much, the new songs are kerosene lean; Ferguson and Greuel were disciples of simplicity.
They started from scratch. “Adam and I sat down with the material in raw, cell phone demo form, and those first conversations were something else,” says Ferguson. “We just felt the possibilities were endless.”
Ferguson’s singing is pure. Freshened with just the right amount of reverb, you could swear it’s Jim James singing “From Me to You.” Yet at the core of this batch of songs is his guitar work. There’s a reason Ferguson picks his six-string with such purpose. He’s a recovering lead guitarist in rock and roll bands Smokin’ Bandits and Clovis Mann, to name just two. He says moving from lead guitar and singing side man into solo work challenged him to pay equal attention to the guitar and the songwriting.
Ferguson has held a weekly residency at HotelRed, which has allowed him to work out musical ideas. You could say the new album was born there. “The vast majority of the material really came on the Wednesdays at the hotel, playing through ideas worked up from the previous week and then loosely formed into a song in between Wednesdays.”
Even though he’ll be debuting his new band, The Sundown Sound, there will be nothing loose about his performance April 27 at the Stoughton Opera House. And he’ll definitely be among friends. Adam Greuel and Horseshoes’ banjoist Russ Pedersen will open.
